Your data, your doctor, your time.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Provider Questions:

How do I bill for Housecall sessions?

Housecall has information fields contained in each patient profile for patient identification and optional patient credit card information. It is up to each provider to bill the patient’s insurance if telemedicine is covered in their area, or to negotiate telemedicine rates with their patients. The specific billing is left up to each provider to bill through their practice or via credit card. Current usual rates are $40-50 for up to a 15 minute session.

How do I find patients on Housecall?

Housecall is designed to supplement your current practice. While patients certainly can schedule appointments with any provider on Housecall, the app was designed to allow providers to perform telemedicine visits with currently established patients and offer a new level of service and connectivity to your practice. How you market Housecall in your practice is left up to you. We plan to add marketing materials in the future that can be downloaded to promote Housecall in your practice. The app is designed to promote improved chronic care of patients rather than episodic care of patients never seen in person by the provider.

Can I use Housecall to connect to another provider?

Yes you can!. Housecall not only provides connections from patient to provider but it allows you to make provider to provider connections for remote consultation. You schedule a visit with another provider just like any other appointment. You can also consult with a group of providers if they are listed as a group and you will get the first provider in that group that accepts the consult. This is a secure way to provide specialist consultative services available through Housecall.

Can I group all of the providers in my practice together into a group provider?

Yes but each one of the providers must register as an individual provider with Housecall. Each provider can then be added into a “group” in Housecall. Any appointment with that group is given the the first provider in the group to accept the appointment.

Are the Housecall doctor’s notes seen by the patients?

No. they can only be reviewed by the scheduled provider either within the app or the scheduling module.

Is there a way to manage my Housecall schedule outside the app or do I have to use my phone or ipad?

Yes, you or your staff can access and manage your Housecall schedule through our scheduling portal at http://iheartdoc.com/housecall/ You must logon as each provider within the portal. A separate scheduler logon is not currently supported.

Can’t I just use Skype or Facetime to talk to my patients? How is Housecall different from those?

No, you cannot use Skype or Facetime to conduct HIPAA compliant sessions as these protocols are not secure and encrypted. You may expose your patient’s medical data and personal health information to the public using these methods and be subject to federal penalties. Housecall is encrypted, and secure to both HIPAA and HiTech standards.

How much does the Housecall service cost for a provider?

Housecall is currently priced at only $9.99 per month for unlimited use of the service. The first month’s service is free and further use is paid within the app through an in-app purchase. You can avoid any potential service interruption and save a little money by purchasing a longer term of service. Housecall is currently priced at only $99.99 for a year of unlimited service.

I signed up for Housecall in the past but I no longer see my provider account. What happened?

Housecall provider registration may be terminated for a variety of reasons. One of the most common reasons is to remove inactive provider accounts that are have not been active within the past 180 days. Using the in-app purchase restores the account in many cases. If you cannot sign in despite this, you may need to re-register your provider account or contact Housecall support for account restoration.

Any account that is found to contain fraudulent information or not compliant with our terms of service is subject to immediate cancellation without notice.

6 thoughts on “FAQ”

Thank you. We will look at this. Make sure you are saving the profile information prior to leaving the screen by clicking the disk in the upper right corner. It is not automatically saving. We are going to fix that in an upcoming release.

As a Physician medical provider interested in using your software, I need to clarify a few matter about your software and platform…

Can we track the duration of the patient call?

Can the count on time spent start when the actual evaluation starts? Who is controlling and How is this “start counting” function controlled 24/7?

Can we create profiles for every physician in our medical center and centrally monitor usage by patients and availability of our physicians? and how frequently they are used? and what is the duration of the call?

Can we create a profile for our service (our medical center) where we list all our faculty who wish to participate in this? and then market it to our patients and community?

There is no current mechanism for tracking the length of each call. We are planning on adding this feature in future updates but the time must be tracked manually for now. iOS has a timer in the clock app that could be used for that purpose. You must create a profile for each provider to use the service. You can group the providers into a group (your medical center) and an appointment can be made for the first available provider to respond. You can also make provider to provider appointments for consultation between remote providers or specialists and primary providers. The service is secure and encrypted unlike Skype or Facetime. It meats HIPPA and HITECH standards for medical communication and the protection of personal health information.

Thanks for your comments and interest. Our introductory pricing has been offered for over a year. We recently changed our pricing structure. For providers, the first month is free. Following that trial month, the app is $200 dollars per month with discounts for longer term use. This equates to around 4 visits a month as the break even point for most providers. We will change the introduction to reflect the pricing change. The app is now free for both providers and patients to download. It is always free for patient use.

Thanks for your comment. We take privacy and the proper use of our telemedicine app very seriously. We do not audit any video stream and thus HIPPA privacy is not an issue. Your connection is one to one between patient and provider or between providers. . We do look at session time and use. We reserve the right to terminate or limit a user that may be using the app in a manner in which it is not intended. This is also outlined in our terms of service. Monitoring of app use and the limitation or termination of users not abiding by the terms of service IS a federal security requirement.